1URSULA HAD to make a great effort to fulfill her promise to die when it cleared. The waves of

2lucidity that were so scarce during the rains became more frequent after August, when an and wind

3began to blow and suffocated the rose bushes and petrified the piles of mud, and ended up

4scattering over Macondo the burning dust that covered the rusted zinc roofs and the age-old almond

5trees forever. Ursula cried in lamentation when she discovered that for more than three years she

6had been a plaything for the children. She washed her painted face, took off the strips of brightly

7colored cloth, the dried lizards and frogs, and the rosaries and old Arab necklaces that they had hung

8all over her body, and for the first time since the death of Amaranta she got up out of bed without

9anybody’s help to join in the family life once more. The spirit of her invincible heart guided her

10through the shadows. Those who noticed her stumbling and who bumped into the archangelic arm

11she kept raised at head level thought that she was having trouble with her body, but they still did not

12think she was blind. She did not need to see to realize that the flower beds, cultivated with such care

13since the first rebuilding, had been destroyed by the rain and mined by Aureliano Segundo’s

14excavations, and that the walls and the cement of the floors were cracked, the furniture mushy and

15discolored, the doors off their hinges, and the family menaced by a spirit of resignation and despair

16that was inconceivable in her time. Feeling her way along through the empty bedrooms she

17perceived the continuous rumble of the termites as they carved the wood, the snipping of the moths

18in the clothes closets, and the devastating noise of the enormous red ants that had prospered during

19the deluge and were undermining the foundations of the house. One day she opened the tmnk with

20the saints and had to ask Santa Sofia de la Piedad to get off her body the cockroaches that jumped

21out and that had already turned the clothing to dust. “A person can’t live in neglect like this,” she

22said. “If we go on like this we’ll be devoured by animals.” From then on she did not have a moment

23of repose. Up before dawn, she would use anybody available, even the children. She put the few

24articles of clothing that were still usable out into the sun, she drove the cockroaches off with

25powerful insecticide attacks, she scratched out the veins that the termites had made on doors and

26windows and asphyxiated the ants in their anthills with quicklime. The fever of restoration finally

27brought her to the forgotten rooms. She cleared out the rubble and cobwebs in the room where Jose

28Arcadio Buendfa had lost his wits looking for the Philosopher’s stone, she put the silver shop which

29had been upset by the soldiers in order, and lastly she asked for the keys to Melquiades’ room to see

30what state it was in. Faithful to the wishes of Jose Arcadio Segundo, who had forbidden anyone to

31come in unless there was a clear indication that he had died, Santa Sofia de la Piedad tried all kinds

32of subterfuges to throw Ursula off the track. But so inflexible was her determination not to

33surrender even the most remote corner of the house to the insects that she knocked down every

34obstacle in her path, and after three days of insistence she succeeded in getting them to open the

35door for her. She had to hold on to the doorjamb so that the stench would not knock her over, but

36she needed only two seconds to remember that the schoolgirls’ seventy-two chamberpots were in

37there and that on one of the rainy nights a patrol of soldiers had searched the house looking for Jose

38Arcadio Segundo and had been unable to find him.

39“Lord save us!” she exclaimed, as if she could see everything. “So much trouble teaching you

40good manners and you end up living like a pig. ”

41Jose Arcadio Segundo was still reading over the parchments. The only thing visible in the

42intricate tangle of hair was the teeth striped with green dime and his motionless eyes. When he

43recognized his great-grandmother’s voice he turned his head toward the door, tried to smile, and

44without knowing it repeated an old phrase of Ursula’s.

45“What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.”

46“That’s how it goes,” Ursula said, “but not so much.”

47When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendia

48had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not

49passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. But even then she did not give

50resignation a chance. She scolded Jose Arcadio Segundo as if he were a child and insisted that he

51take a bath and shave and lend a hand in fixing up the house. The simple idea of abandoning the

52room that had given him peace terrified Jose Arcadio Segundo. He shouted that there was no

53human power capable of making him go out because he did not want to see the train with two

54hundred cars loaded with dead people which left Macondo every day at dusk on its way to the sea.

55“They were all of those who were at the station,” he shouted. “Three thousand four hundred eight.”

56Only then did Ursula realize that he was in a world of shadows more impenetrable than hers, as un¬

57reachable and solitary as that of his great-grandfather. She left him in the room, but she succeeded in

58getting them to leave the padlock off, clean it every day, throw the chamberpots away except for

59one, and to keep Jose Arcadio Segundo as clean and presentable as Iris great-grandfather had been

60during his long captivity under the chestnut tree. At first Fernanda interpreted that bustle as an

61attack of senile madness and it was difficult for her to suppress her exasperation. But about that time

62Jose Arcadio told her that he planned to come to Macondo from Rome before taking his final vows,

63and the good news filled her with such enthusiasm that from morning to night she would be seen

64watering the flowers four times a day so that her son would not have a bad impression of the house.

65It was that same incentive which induced her to speed up her correspondence with the invisible

66doctors and to replace the pots of ferns and oregano and the begonias on the porch even before

67Ursula found out that they had been destroyed by Aureliano Segundo’s exterminating fury. Later on

68she sold the silver service and bought ceramic dishes, pewter bowls and soup spoons, and alpaca

69tablecloths, and with them brought poverty to the cupboards that had been accustomed to India

70Company chinaware and Bohemian crystal. Ursula always tried to go a step beyond. “Open the

71windows and the doors,” she shouted. “Cook some meat and fish, buy the largest turtles around, let

72strangers come and spread their mats in the corners and urinate in the rose bushes and sit down to

73eat as many times as they want and belch and rant and muddy everything with their boots, and let

74them do whatever they want to us, because that’s the only way to drive off rain.” But it was a vain

75illusion. She was too old then and living on borrowed time to repeat the miracle of the little candy

76animals, and none of her descendants had inherited her strength. The house stayed closed on

77Fernanda’s orders.

78Aureliano Segundo, who had taken his tmnks back to the house of Petra Cotes, barely had

79enough means to see that the family did not starve to death. With the raffling of the mule, Petra

80Cotes and he bought some more animals with which they managed to set up a primitive lottery

81business. Aureliano Segundo would go from house to house selling the tickets that he himself

82painted with colored ink to make them more attractive and convincing, and perhaps he did not

83realize that many people bought them out of gratitude and most of them out of pity. Nevertheless,

84even the most pitying purchaser was getting a chance to win a pig for twenty cents or a calf for

85thirty-two, and they became so hopeful that on Tuesday nights Petra Cotes’s courtyard overflowed

86with people waiting for the moment when a child picked at random drew the winning number from

87a bag. It did not take long to become a weekly fair, for at dusk food and drink stands would be set

88up in the courtyard and many of those who were favored would slaughter the animals they had won

89right there on the condition that someone else supply the liquor and music, so that without having

90wanted to, Aureliano Segundo suddenly found himself playing the accordion again and participating

91in modest tourneys of voracity. Those humble replicas of the revelry of former times served to show

92Aureliano Segundo himself how much his spirits had declined and to what a degree his skill as a masterful carouser had dried up. He was a changed man. The two hundred forty pounds that he had

93attained during the days when he had been challenged by The Elephant had been reduced to one

94hundred fifty-six; the glowing and bloated tortoise face had turned into that of an iguana, and he was

95always on the verge of boredom and fatigue. For Petra Cotes, however, he had never been a better

96man than at that time, perhaps because the pity that he inspired was mixed with love, and because of

97the feeling of solidarity that misery aroused in both of them. The broken-down bed ceased to be the

98scene of wild activities and was changed into an intimate refuge. Freed of the repetitious mirrors,

99which had been auctioned off to buy animals for the lottery, and from the lewd damasks and velvets,

100which the mule had eaten, they would stay up very late with the innocence of two sleepless

101grandparents, taking advantage of the time to draw up accounts and put away pennies which they

102formerly wasted just for the sake of it. Sometimes the cock’s crow would find them piling and

103unpiling coins, taking a bit away from here to put there, to that this bunch would be enough to keep

104Fernanda happy and that would be for Amaranta Ursula’s shoes, and that other one for Santa Sofia

105de la Piedad, who had not had a new dress since the time of all the noise, and this to order the coffin

106if Ursula died, and this for the coffee which was going up a cent a pound in price every three

107months, and this for the sugar which sweetened less every day, and this for the lumber which was

108still wet from the rains, and this other one for the paper and the colored ink to make tickets with,

109and what was left over to pay off the winner of the April calf whose hide they had miraculously

110saved when it came down with a symptomatic carbuncle just when all of the numbers in the raffle

111had already been sold. Those rites of poverty were so pure that they nearly always set aside the

112largest share for Fernanda, and they did not do so out of remorse or charity, but because her well¬

113being was more important to them than their own. What was really happening to them, although

114neither of them realized it, was that they both thought of Fernanda as the daughter that they would

115have liked to have and never did, to the point where on a certain occasion they resigned themselves

116to eating crumbs for three days, so that she could buy a Dutch tablecloth. Nevertheless, no matter

117how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no

118matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they

119put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with. During the waking hours when

120the accounts were bad. they wondered what had happened in the world for the animals not to breed

121with the same drive as before, why money slipped through their fingers, and why people who a short

122time before had burned rolls of bills in the carousing considered it highway robbery to charge twelve

123cents for a raffle of six hens. Aureliano Segundo thought without saying so that the evil was not in

124the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes, where something had

125happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile and made money scarce. Intrigued by

126that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because

127by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved

128him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she

129began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both

130looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an

131annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to fund the paradise of

132shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of

133loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they

134were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like

135dogs.

136The raffles never got very far. At first Aureliano Segundo would spend three days of the week

137shut up in what had been Iris rancher’s office drawing ticket after ticket, Painting with a fair skill a

138red cow, a green pig, or a group of blue hens, according to the animal being raffled, and he would

139sketch out a good imitation of printed numbers and the name that Petra Cotes thought good to call the business: Divine Providence Raffles. But with time he felt so tired after drawing up to two thousand

140tickets a week that he had the animals, the name, and the numbers put on rubber stamps, and then

141the work was reduced to moistening them on pads of different colors. In his last years it occurred to

142him to substitute riddles for the numbers so that the prize could be shared by all of those who

143guessed it, but the system turned out to be so complicated and was open to so much suspicion that

144he gave it up after the second attempt.

145Aureliano Segundo was so busy trying to maintain the prestige of his raffles that he barely had

146time to see the children. Fernanda put Amaranta Ursula in a small private school where they

147admitted only six girls, but she refused to allow Aureliano to go to public school. She considered

148that she had already relented too much in letting him leave the room. Besides, the schools in those

149days accepted only the legitimate offspring of Catholic marriages and on the birth certificate that had

150been pinned to Aureliano’s clothing when they brought him to the house he was registered as a

151foundling. So he remained shut In at the mercy of Santa Sofia de la Piedad’s loving eyes and Ursula’s

152mental quirks, learning in the narrow world of the house whatever Iris grandmothers explained to

153him. He was delicate, thin, with a curiosity that unnerved the adults, but unlike the inquisitive and

154sometimes clairvoyant look that the colonel had at his age, his look was blinking and somewhat

155distracted. While Amaranta Ursula was in kindergarten, he would hunt earthworms and torture

156insects in the garden. But once when Fernanda caught him putting scorpions in a box to put in

157Ursula’s bed, she locked him up in Meme’s old room, where he spent his solitary hours looking

158through the pictures in the encyclopedia. Ursula found him there one afternoon when she was going

159about sprinkling the house with distilled water and a bunch of nettles, and in spite of the fact that

160she had been with him many times she asked him who he was.

161“I’m Aureliano Buendia,” he said.

162“That’s right” she replied. “And now it’s time for you to start learning how to be a silversmith.”

163She had confused him with her son again, because the hot wind that came after the deluge and

164had brought occasional waves of lucidity to Ursula’s brain had passed. She never got her reason

165back. When she went into the bedroom she found Petronila Iguaran there with the bothersome

166crinolines and the beaded jacket that she put on for formal visits, and she found Tranquilina Maria

167Miniata Alacoque Buendia, her grandmother, fanning herself with a peacock feather in her invalid’s

168rocking chair, and her great-grandfather Aureliano Arcadio Buendia, with his imitation dolman of

169the viceregal guard, and Aureliano Iguaran, her father, who had invented a prayer to make the

170worms shrivel up and drop off cows, and her timid mother, and her cousin with the pig’s tail, and

171Jose Arcadio Buendia, and her dead sons, all sitting in chairs lined up against the wall as if it were a

172wake and not a visit. She was tying a colorful string of chatter together, commenting on things from

173many separate places and many different times, so that when Amaranta Ursula returned from school

174and Aureliano grew tired of the encyclopedia, they would find her sitting on her bed, talking to

175herself and lost in a labyrinth of dead people. “Fire!” she shouted once in terror and for an instant

176panic spread through the house, but what she was telling about was the burning of a barn that she

177had witnessed when she was four years old. She finally mixed up the past with the present in such a

178way that in the two or three waves of lucidity that she had before she died, no one knew for certain

179whether she was speaking about what she felt or what she remembered. Little by little she was

180shrinking, turning into a fetus, becoming mummified in life to the point that in her last months she

181was a cherry raisin lost inside of her nightgown, and the arm that she always kept raised looked like

182the paw of a marimonda monkey. She was motionless for several days, and Santa Sofia de la Piedad

183had to shake her to convince herself that she was alive and sat her on her lap to feed her a few

184spoonfuls of sugar water. She looked like a newborn old woman. Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano

185would take her in and out of the bedroom, they would lay her on the altar to see if she was any

186larger than the Christ child, and one afternoon they hid her in a closet in the Pantry where the rats could have eaten her. One Palm Sunday they went into the bedroom while Fernanda was in church

187and carried Ursula out by the neck and ankles.

188“Poor great-great-grandmother,” Amaranta Ursula said. “She died of old age.”

189Ursula was startled.

190“Pm alive!” she said.

191“You can see.” Amaranta Ursula said, suppressing her laughter, “that she’s not even breathing.”

192“Pm talking!” Ursula shouted.

193“She can’t even talk,” Aureliano said. “She died like a little cricket.”

194Then Ursula gave in to the evidence. “My God,” she exclaimed in a low voice. “So this is what

195it’s like to be dead.” She started an endless, stumbling, deep prayer that lasted more than two days,

196and that by Tuesday had degenerated into a hodgepodge of requests to God and bits of practical

197advice to stop the red ants from bringing the house down, to keep the lamp burning by Remedios’

198daguerreotype, and never to let any Buendia marry a person of the same blood because their

199children would be born with the tail of a pig. Aureliano Segundo tried to take advantage of her

200delirium to get her to ten him where the gold was buried, but his entreaties were useless once more

201“When the owner appears,” Ursula said, “God will illuminate him so that he will find it.” Santa Sofia

202de la Piedad had the certainty that they would find her dead from one moment to the next, because

203she noticed during those days a certain confusion in nature: the roses smelled like goosefoot, a pod

204of chick peas fell down and the beans lay on the ground in a perfect geometrical pattern in the shape

205of a starfish and one night she saw a row of luminous orange disks pass across the sky.

206They found her dead on the morning of Good Friday. The last time that they had helped her

207calculate her age, during the time of the banana company, she had estimated it as between one

208hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty-two. They buried her in a coffin that was not much larger

209than the basket in which Aureliano had arrived, and very few people were at the funeral, partly

210because there wet not many left who remembered her, and partly because it was so hot that noon

211that the birds in their confusion were running into walls like day pigeons and breaking through

212screens to die in the bedrooms.

213At first they thought it was a plague. Housewives were exhausted from sweeping away so many

214dead birds, especially at siesta time, and the men dumped them into the river by the cartload. On

215Easter Sunday the hundred-year-old Father Antonio Isabel stated from the pulpit that the death of

216the birds was due to the evil influence of the Wandering Jew, whom he himself had seen the night

217before. He described him as a cross between a billy goat and a female heretic, an infernal beast

218whose breath scorched the air and whose look brought on the birth of monsters in newlywed

219women. There were not many who paid attention to his apocalyptic talk, for the town was

220convinced that the priest was rambling because of his age. But one woman woke everybody up at

221dawn on Wednesday because she found the tracks of a biped with a cloven hoof. They were so clear

222and unmistakable that those who went to look at them had no doubt about the existence of a

223fearsome creature similar to the one described by the parish priest and they got together to set traps

224in their courtyards. That was how they managed to capture it. Two weeks after Ursula’s death, Petra

225Cotes and Aureliano Segundo woke up frightened by the especially loud bellowing of a calf that was

226coming from nearby. When they got there a group of men were already pulling the monster off the

227sharpened stakes they had set in the bottom of a pit covered with dry leaves, and it stopped lowing.

228It was as heavy as an ox in spite of the fact that it was no taller than a young steer, and a green and

229greasy liquid flowed from its wounds. Its body was covered with rough hair, plagued with small

230ticks, and the skin was hardened with the scales of a remora fish, but unlike the priest’s description,

231its human parts were more like those of a sickly angel than of a man, for its hands were tense and

232agile, its eyes large and gloomy, and on its shoulder blades it had the scarred-over and calloused

233stumps of powerful wings which must have been chopped off by a woodsman’s ax. They hung it to an almond tree in the square by its ankles so that everyone could see it, and when it began to rot

234they burned it in a bonfire, for they could not determine whether its bastard nature was that of an

235animal to be thrown into the river or a human being to be buried. It was never established whether

236it had really caused the death of the birds, but the newly married women did not bear the predicted

237monsters, nor did the intensity of the heat decrease.

238Rebeca died at the end of that year. Argenida, her lifelong servant, asked the authorities for help

239to knock down the door to the bedroom where her mistress had been locked in for three days, and

240they found her, on her solitary bed, curled up like a shrimp, with her head bald from ringworm and

241her finger in her mouth. Aureliano Segundo took charge of the funeral and tried to restore the house

242in order to sell it, but the destruction was so far advanced in it that the walls became scaly as soon as

243they were painted and there was not enough mortar to stop the weeds from cracking the floors and

244the ivy from rotting the beams.

245That was how everything went after the deluge. The indolence of the people was in contrast to

246the voracity of oblivion, which little by little was undermining memories in a pitiless way, to such an

247extreme that at that time, on another anniversary of the Treaty of Neerlandia, some emissaries from

248the president of the republic arrived in Macondo to award at last the decoration rejected several

249times by Colonel Aureliano Buendfa, and they spent a whole afternoon looking for someone who

250could tell them where they could find one of his descendants. Aureliano Segundo was tempted to

251accept it, thinking that it was a medal of solid gold, but Petra Cotes convinced him that it was not

252proper when the emissaries already had some proclamations and speeches ready for the ceremony. It

253was also around that time that the gypsies returned, the last heirs to Melqufades’ science, and they

254found the town so defeated and its inhabitants so removed from the rest of the world that once

255more they went through the houses dragging magnetized ingots as if that really were the Babylonian

256wise men’s latest discovery, and once again they concentrated the sun’s rays with the giant

257magnifying glass, and there was no lack of people standing open-mouthed watching kettles fall and

258pots roll and who paid fifty cents to be startled as a gypsy woman put in her false teeth and took

259them out again. A broken-down yellow train that neither brought anyone in nor took anyone out

260and that scarcely paused at the deserted station was the only thing that was left of the long train to

261which Mr. Brown would couple his glass-topped coach with the episcopal lounging chairs and of the

262fruit trains with one hundred twenty cars which took a whole afternoon to pass by. The ecclesiastical

263delegates who had come to investigate the report of the strange death of the birds and the sacrifice

264of the Wandering Jew found Father Antonio Isabel playing blind man’s buff with the children, and

265thinking that Inis report was the product of a hallucination, they took him off to an asylum. A short

266time later they sent Father Augusto Angel, a crusader of the new breed, intransigent, audacious,

267daring, who personally rang the bells several times a day so that the peoples spirits would not get

268drowsy, and who went from house to house waking up the sleepers to go to mass but before a year

269was out he too was conquered by the negligence that one breathed in with the air, by the hot dust

270that made everything old and clogged up, and by the drowsiness caused by lunchtime meatballs in

271the unbearable heat of siesta time.

272With Ursula’s death the house again fell into a neglect from which it could not be rescued even

273by a will as resolute and vigorous as that of Amaranta Ursula, who many years later, being a happy,

274modern woman without prejudices, with her feet on the ground, opened doors and windows in

275order to drive away the rain, restored the garden, exterminated the red ants who were already

276walking across the porch in broad daylight, and tried in vain to reawaken the forgotten spirit of

277hospitality. Fernanda’s cloistered passion built in impenetrable dike against Ursula’s torrential

278hundred years. Not only did she refuse to open doors when the arid wind passed through, but she

279had the windows nailed shut with boards in the shape of a cross, obeying the paternal order of being

280buried alive. The expensive correspondence with the invisible doctors ended in failure. After numerous postponements, she shut herself up in her room on the date and hour agreed upon,

281covered only by a white sheet and with her head pointed north, and at one o’clock in the morning

282she felt that they were covering her head with a handkerchief soaked in a glacial liquid. When she

283woke up the sun was shining in the window and she had a barbarous stitch in the shape of an arc

284that began at her crotch and ended at her sternum. But before she could complete the prescribed

285rest she received a disturbed letter from the invisible doctors, who mid they had inspected her for

286six hours without finding anything that corresponded to the symptoms so many times and so

287scrupulously described by her. Actually, her pernicious habit of not calling things by their names had

288brought about a new confusion, for the only thing that the telepathic surgeons had found was a drop

289in the uterus which could be corrected by the use of a pessary. The disillusioned Fernanda tried to

290obtain more precise information, but the unknown correspondents did not answer her letters any

291more. She felt so defeated by the weight of an unknown word that she decided to put shame behind

292her and ask what a pessary was, and only then did she discover that the French doctor had hanged

293himself to a beam three months earlier and had been buried against the wishes of the townspeople

294by a former companion in arms of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. Then she confided in her son Jose

295Arcadio and the latter sent her the pessaries from Rome along with a pamphlet explaining their use,

296which she flushed down the toilet after committing it to memory so that no one would learn the

297nature of her troubles. It was a useless precaution because the only people who lived in the house

298scarcely paid any attention to her. Santa Sofia de la Piedad was wandering about in her solitary old

299age, cooking the little that they ate and almost completely dedicated to the care of Jose Arcadio

300Segundo. Amaranta Ursula, who had inherited certain attractions of Remedios the Beauty, spent the

301time that she had formerly wasted tormenting Ursula at her schoolwork, and she began to show

302good judgment and a dedication to study that brought back to Aureliano Segundo the high hopes

303that Meme had inspired in him. He had promised her to send her to finish her studies in Bmssels, in

304accord with a custom established during the time of the banana company, and that illusion had

305brought him to attempt to revive the lands devastated by the deluge. The few times that he appeared

306at the house were for Amaranta Ursula, because with time he had become a stranger to Fernanda

307and little Aureliano was becoming withdrawn as he approached puberty. Aureliano Segundo had

308faith that Fernanda’s heart would soften with old age so that the child could join in the life of the

309town where no one certainly would make any effort to speculate suspiciously about his origins. But

310Aureliano himself seemed to prefer the cloister of solitude and he did not show the least desire to

311know the world that began at the street door of the house. When Ursula had the door of

312Melquiades’ room opened he began to linger about it, peeping through the half-opened door, and no

313one knew at what moment he became close to Jose Arcadio Segundo in a link of mutual affection.

314Aureliano Segundo discovered that friendship a long time after it had begun, when he heard the

315child talking about the killing at the station. It happened once when someone at the table

316complained about the ruin into which the town had sunk when the banana company had abandoned

317it, and Aureliano contradicted him with maturity and with the vision of a grown person. His point of

318view, contrary to the general interpretation, was that Macondo had been a prosperous place and well

319on its way until it was disordered and cormpted and suppressed by the banana company, whose

320engineers brought on the deluge as a pretext to avoid promises made to the workers. Speaking with

321such good sense that to Fernanda he was like a sacrilegious parody of Jews among the wise men, the

322child described with precise and convincing details how the army had macliine-gunned more than

323three thousand workers penned up by the station and how they loaded the bodies onto a two-

324hundred-car train and threw them into the sea. Convinced as most people were by the official

325version that nothing had happened, Fernanda was scandalized with the idea that the child had

326inherited the anarchist ideas of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and told him to be quiet. Aureliano

327Segundo, on the other hand, recognized his twin brother’s version. Actually, in spite of the fact that everyone considered him mad, Jose Arcadio Segundo was at that time the most lucid inhabitant of

328the house. He taught little Aureliano how to read and write, initiated him in the study of the

329parchments, and he inculcated him with such a personal interpretation of what the banana company

330had meant to Macondo that many years later, when Aureliano became part of the world, one would

331have thought that he was telling a hallucinated version, because it was radically opposed to the false

332one that historians had created and consecrated in the schoolbooks. In the small isolated room

333where the arid air never penetrated, nor the dust, nor the heat, both had the atavistic vision of an old

334man, his back to the window, wearing a hat with a brim like the wings of a crow who spoke about

335the world many years before they had been born. Both described at the same time how it was always

336March there and always Monday, and then they understood that Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as

337crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the tmth of

338the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an

339eternalized fragment in a room. Jose Arcadio Segundo had managed, furthermore, to classify the

340cryptic letters of the parchments. He was certain that they corresponded to an alphabet of forty-

341seven to fifty-three characters, which when separated looked like scratching and scribbling, and

342which in the fine hand of Melquiades looked like pieces of clothing put out to dry on a line.

343Aureliano remembered having seen a similar table in the English encyclopedia, so he brought it to

344the room to compare it with that of Jose Arcadio Segundo. They were indeed the same.

345Around the time of the riddle lottery, Aureliano Segundo began waking up with a knot in his

346throat, as if he were repressing a desire to weep. Petra Cotes interpreted it as one more of so many

347upsets brought on by the bad situation, and every morning for over a year she would touch his

348palate with a dash of honey and give him some radish syrup. When the knot in his throat became so

349oppressive that it was difficult for him to breathe, Aureliano Segundo visited Pilar Ternera to see if

350she knew of some herb that would give him relief. The dauntless grandmother, who had reached a

351hundred years of age managing a small, clandestine brothel, did not tmst therapeutic superstitions,

352so she turned the matter over to her cards. She saw the queen of diamonds with her throat wounded

353by the steel of the jack of spades, and she deduced that Fernanda was trying to get her husband back

354home by means of the discredited method of sticking pins into his picture but that she had brought

355on an internal tumor because of her clumsy knowledge of the black arts. Since Aureliano Segundo

356had no other pictures except those of his wedding and the copies were all in the family album, he

357kept searching all through the house when his wife was not looking, and finally, in the bottom of the

358dresser, he came across a half-dozen pessaries in their original boxes. Thinking that the small red

359rubber rings were objects of witchcraft he put them in his pocket so that Pilar Ternera could have a

360look at them. She could not determine their nature, but they looked so suspicious to her that in any

361case she burned them in a bonfire she built in the courtyard. In order to conjure away Fernanda’s

362alleged curse, she told Aureliano Segundo that he should soak a broody hen and bury her alive under

363the chestnut tree, and he did it with such good faith that when he finished hiding the turned-up

364earth with dried leaves he already felt that he was breathing better. For her part, Fernanda

365interpreted the disappearance as a reprisal by the invisible doctors and she sewed a pocket of casing

366to the inside of her camisole where she kept the new pessaries that her son sent her.

367Six months after he had buried the hen, Aureliano Segundo woke up at midnight with an attack

368of coughing and the feeling that he was being strangled within by the claws of a crab. It was then

369that he understood that for all of the magical pessaries that he destroyed and all the conjuring hens

370that he soaked, the single and sad piece of truth was that he was dying. He did not tell anyone.

371Tormented by the fear of dying without having sent Amaranta Ursula to Bmssels, he worked as he

372had never done, and instead of one he made three weekly raffles. From very early in the morning he

373could be seen going through the town, even in the most outlying and miserable sections, trying to

374sell tickets with an anxiety that could only be conceivable in a dying man. “Here’s Divine Providence,” he hawked. “Don’t let it get away, because it only comes every hundred years.” He